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I meant that it's worked out pretty well for Java. ML -- one of my favorite languages, alongside Java and a couple of others -- has also managed to avoid being

by pron 7y ago

I meant that it's worked out pretty well for Java. ML -- one of my favorite languages, alongside Java and a couple of others -- has also managed to avoid being used by anyone, really. But look at Java now: it has generics and higher-order functions, and it's getting a uniform treatment of types (Project Valhalla), and pattern matching [1]. And so while ML introduced those features in a research context, Java is the language that has made and will make the world actually use them. Being ahead of your time is often just as much of a mistake as being behind (as far as product design goes). As to the question of "holding programming back," it is yet to be seen how much of an impact these features have in practice. Same goes for what ML "lacked." I personally like some features more and some less, as do you, but I don't think anyone knows which programming language features really push programming forward. [1]: https://cr.openjdk.java.net/~briangoetz/amber/pattern-match.html https://cr.openjdk.java.net/~briangoetz/amber/pattern-match....

AnimalMuppet 7y ago
"Holding programming back" means that it would have advanced in the absence of Java. What language would have advanced it? Cladote seems to assume that ML would have, which would have been actually used if Java hadn't taken over the world. That seems unsupported by evidence. Overly optimistic, as well. And if Cladote's answer, ML, would not have taken over, then did Java hold back anything? No. Was it better than, say, C++? For many uses, yes. "We would have ruled the world if it wasn't for you meddling kids!" is wishful thinking. If ML was so good, it should have won anyway. Instead, "has managed to avoid being used by anyone" is a pretty fair assessment.
- Cladode 7y ago
  If we collapse the two concepts of - best possible X - most popular X are we loosing possibly interesting perspectives on X?
  - pron 7y ago
    I don't think AnimalMuppet is confusing most popular with best. But as you don't have the data required to conclude which language is better by any meaningful metric, anyway, then your claim is just wishful thinking. If ML had won and Java lost, one could have just as easily said that ML was holding programming back from some imagined benefit Java would have brought. I think that it is you who are confusing "an interesting perspective" with a value judgment. Yes, ML had pattern matching before Java, while Java had pervasive dynamic linking and dynamic code loading. Those are simple facts and perhaps "an interesting perspective," but how do you decide which is better?
    - Cladode 7y ago
      Nobody has credible data enabling reproducible comparison of programming languages. The big lacuna of PL research ... If popularity mattered ... PHP, JavaScript etc. I find the evolution of all successful programming languages eventually to evolve into an ML-like core fascinating.
      - pron 7y ago
        > Nobody has credible data enabling reproducible comparison of programming languages. Right, so as "better" and "best" are unknown, we should stop using those terms. I like Java and I like ML, but I don't know that one of them is better than the other, and if so which. > I find the evolution of all successful programming languages eventually to evolve into an ML-like core fascinating. Some of the successful typed languages, sure: Java, C++, C#, but the three heavily influence one another, and at least Java's and C#'s designers were aware of ML. So I don't think that, to the extent this is true, it's some "natural" draw, but rather a direct or indirect influence. On the other hand, you have Go, which is also quite successful (admittedly in a lower tier of success), and it doesn't seem to be converging on something ML-like, though (although it is influenced by another Milner idea), and neither is C.
  - AnimalMuppet 7y ago
    Absolutely. Popularity is absolutely fallible. But I don't take claims of "X language was better and should have won" claims very seriously, partly because it's claimed by advocates of so many different languages. Should ML have won, or should Pascal/Modula2/Oberon? I've seen that claim, here, just from different people and for different reasons. But I also don't take such claims very seriously because, while popularity can be wrong, so can unpopularity. That one guy spouting off about how everyone else is wrong and he's right? Sometimes he is right - but not often. More often, that person who thinks they have the right answer is seeing less than the full picture. I mean, how many people use Java? Several million? Would ML really have been a better answer for the majority of those several million people? I react the same in government, by the way. When someone says, "I know what you should want, and I'm going to make it happen, even if it isn't what you actually want", well, I trust the people to know what fits them better than someone who isn't in their shoes.
- psychoslave 7y ago
  >If ML was so good, it should have won anyway. Experience proves otherwise, to the best of my knoledge. For gaining wide propagation in a niche, whether of habitat or market, being the paragon of what can be conceived is rarely the way to optimize success. There are many other factors, and technical merit is lightly pondered. That's true for life, where there are numerous examples where a function is filled by an organ that evolved in a counter manner of what an engineer sense of elegance/parsimony would provide. That's also something that happens for technical products, where early proliferation in the market seems to offer a far more successful advantage than excellence of the product. That said, I never had the opportunity to touch ML, and only already heard about it through my personal research on the roots of Coq that I studied during my CS courses in University. I didn't touched much of Java since I left University. Last year I worked on an SDK provided for several languages, including Java, so it gave me the opportunity to look at how it evolved, and play with its integration of functional paradigm. That still requires far too much boilerplate code to my gust, but is bit less frustrating in how you can structure your code.
  - pron 7y ago
    > Experience proves otherwise, to the best of my knowledge. It's very hard to say that it does in programming, at least. Even though we could easily come up with value metrics for programming languages, we don't really know what they are for any particular language. However, that, in itself tells us something. The software industry is an environment with strong selective pressures. That big difference in "quality" (i.e. some metric with a bottom-line impact) will go unnoticed is hard to believe. It doesn't make sense from a theoretical perspective -- adaptive traits should be detected in a selective environment, and it also doesn't fit with observed reality. We observe that technologies that truly provide an adaptive benefit are adopted at a pace commensurate with their relative adaptability; often practically overnight. So we have reasons to believe that it is not true that "better" languages lose, at least not ones that have some measure of adoption at all.
    - ernst_klim 7y ago
      > strong selective pressures The opposite is true. Unlike in electronics, construction, shipbuilding, you can write a shitty software and patch the hell out of it after release most of the time with the few exceptions. Hence the only thing that matters is how cheap and replaceable the developers are. Unlike pharma or architecture, where errors are always costly. Java was successful because is was 1) pushed by big enterprise company, 2) familiar to people with C,C++,perl background and 3) overall easy to write at the expense of verbosity and bloated codebases (who cares if you could just hire too many of the cheap devs who would write as many classes as needed).

by pron 7y ago

AnimalMuppet 7y ago

"Holding programming back" means that it would have advanced in the absence of Java. What language would have advanced it? Cladote seems to assume that ML would have, which would have been actually used if Java hadn't taken over the world. That seems unsupported by evidence. Overly optimistic, as well. And if Cladote's answer, ML, would not have taken over, then did Java hold back anything? No. Was it better than, say, C++? For many uses, yes. "We would have ruled the world if it wasn't for you meddling kids!" is wishful thinking. If ML was so good, it should have won anyway. Instead, "has managed to avoid being used by anyone" is a pretty fair assessment.

Cladode 7y ago
If we collapse the two concepts of - best possible X - most popular X are we loosing possibly interesting perspectives on X?
- pron 7y ago
  I don't think AnimalMuppet is confusing most popular with best. But as you don't have the data required to conclude which language is better by any meaningful metric, anyway, then your claim is just wishful thinking. If ML had won and Java lost, one could have just as easily said that ML was holding programming back from some imagined benefit Java would have brought. I think that it is you who are confusing "an interesting perspective" with a value judgment. Yes, ML had pattern matching before Java, while Java had pervasive dynamic linking and dynamic code loading. Those are simple facts and perhaps "an interesting perspective," but how do you decide which is better?
  - Cladode 7y ago
    Nobody has credible data enabling reproducible comparison of programming languages. The big lacuna of PL research ... If popularity mattered ... PHP, JavaScript etc. I find the evolution of all successful programming languages eventually to evolve into an ML-like core fascinating.
    - pron 7y ago
      > Nobody has credible data enabling reproducible comparison of programming languages. Right, so as "better" and "best" are unknown, we should stop using those terms. I like Java and I like ML, but I don't know that one of them is better than the other, and if so which. > I find the evolution of all successful programming languages eventually to evolve into an ML-like core fascinating. Some of the successful typed languages, sure: Java, C++, C#, but the three heavily influence one another, and at least Java's and C#'s designers were aware of ML. So I don't think that, to the extent this is true, it's some "natural" draw, but rather a direct or indirect influence. On the other hand, you have Go, which is also quite successful (admittedly in a lower tier of success), and it doesn't seem to be converging on something ML-like, though (although it is influenced by another Milner idea), and neither is C.
- AnimalMuppet 7y ago
  Absolutely. Popularity is absolutely fallible. But I don't take claims of "X language was better and should have won" claims very seriously, partly because it's claimed by advocates of so many different languages. Should ML have won, or should Pascal/Modula2/Oberon? I've seen that claim, here, just from different people and for different reasons. But I also don't take such claims very seriously because, while popularity can be wrong, so can unpopularity. That one guy spouting off about how everyone else is wrong and he's right? Sometimes he is right - but not often. More often, that person who thinks they have the right answer is seeing less than the full picture. I mean, how many people use Java? Several million? Would ML really have been a better answer for the majority of those several million people? I react the same in government, by the way. When someone says, "I know what you should want, and I'm going to make it happen, even if it isn't what you actually want", well, I trust the people to know what fits them better than someone who isn't in their shoes.
psychoslave 7y ago
>If ML was so good, it should have won anyway. Experience proves otherwise, to the best of my knoledge. For gaining wide propagation in a niche, whether of habitat or market, being the paragon of what can be conceived is rarely the way to optimize success. There are many other factors, and technical merit is lightly pondered. That's true for life, where there are numerous examples where a function is filled by an organ that evolved in a counter manner of what an engineer sense of elegance/parsimony would provide. That's also something that happens for technical products, where early proliferation in the market seems to offer a far more successful advantage than excellence of the product. That said, I never had the opportunity to touch ML, and only already heard about it through my personal research on the roots of Coq that I studied during my CS courses in University. I didn't touched much of Java since I left University. Last year I worked on an SDK provided for several languages, including Java, so it gave me the opportunity to look at how it evolved, and play with its integration of functional paradigm. That still requires far too much boilerplate code to my gust, but is bit less frustrating in how you can structure your code.
- pron 7y ago
  > Experience proves otherwise, to the best of my knowledge. It's very hard to say that it does in programming, at least. Even though we could easily come up with value metrics for programming languages, we don't really know what they are for any particular language. However, that, in itself tells us something. The software industry is an environment with strong selective pressures. That big difference in "quality" (i.e. some metric with a bottom-line impact) will go unnoticed is hard to believe. It doesn't make sense from a theoretical perspective -- adaptive traits should be detected in a selective environment, and it also doesn't fit with observed reality. We observe that technologies that truly provide an adaptive benefit are adopted at a pace commensurate with their relative adaptability; often practically overnight. So we have reasons to believe that it is not true that "better" languages lose, at least not ones that have some measure of adoption at all.
  - ernst_klim 7y ago
    > strong selective pressures The opposite is true. Unlike in electronics, construction, shipbuilding, you can write a shitty software and patch the hell out of it after release most of the time with the few exceptions. Hence the only thing that matters is how cheap and replaceable the developers are. Unlike pharma or architecture, where errors are always costly. Java was successful because is was 1) pushed by big enterprise company, 2) familiar to people with C,C++,perl background and 3) overall easy to write at the expense of verbosity and bloated codebases (who cares if you could just hire too many of the cheap devs who would write as many classes as needed).